Organizations are increasingly deploying large networks and network-based applications to support internet and intranet technologies. A key benefit of adopting such large networks and network-based applications are scalability of resources, accessibility, and improved reliability of operations. It is often difficult, however, to use existing backup methods to coordinate a backup or restoration of multiple machines in such a network, or to back up all machines relevant to a specific network-based application concurrently.
One approach to backup and restore multiple client computers in a network is to handle each backup or restore operation separately for each client computer to be backed up in the network. This typically means installing and running a backup agent on each client computer that is to be backed up. Such a backup agent is typically configured to back up or recover files contained in a save set on a single client computer, the save set being a collection of data files on the client computer that are backed up and restored together by the backup agent. Handling the backup separately for each client computer is resource intensive, difficult to perform concurrently, and becomes unwieldy from a management perspective as the number of client computers in the network increases.